Out of reach without nuclear and shale

Contrary to what some politicians are arguing, US emission reduction goals for 2025 cannot be achieved without nuclear power and shale gas, argues Geoffrey Styles, Managing Director of independent US-based consultancy GSW Strategy Group. Recent official revisions from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on estimated methane leaks from gas production and use do not negate the benefits of gas in recducing emssions, he adds.

In a recent lead editorial, the Washington Post took presidential candidate Bernie Sanders to task for his attacks on nuclear power and natural gas. The Post focused its critique on greenhouse gas emissions and the emissions trade-offs involved in substituting one form of energy for another. That speaks directly to one of the main reasons that Mr. Sanders’ argument resonates with his supporters, but it ignores an even more basic problem. The energy contribution from shale and nuclear power is so large that if our goal is a reliable, low-emission energy mix that meets the future energy needs of the US economy, we simply cannot get there without them, at least not in any reasonable timeframe.

The pie chart below shows the current sources of US electricity in terms of the energy they generate, rather than their rated capacity. This is an important distinction, because the renewable electricity technologies that have been growing so rapidly–wind and solar–are variable and/or cyclical, generating only a fraction of their rated output over the course of any week, month, or year.

For example, replacing the output of a 2,000 megawatt (MW) nuclear power plant such as the Indian Point facility just north of New York City would require, not 2,000 MW of wind and solar power, but between 7,600 MW and 9,400 MW, based on the applicable capacity factors for such installations. Now scale that up to the whole country. With 99 nuclear reactors in operation, rated at a combined 98,700 MW, it would take at least 375,000 MW of new wind and solar power to displace them. As the Post’s editorial points out, money spent replacing already zero-emission energy is money not spent replacing high-emitting sources.

Fracking has transformed the US energy industry so dramatically that it is very hard to gauge the consequences of a national ban on it, even if such a policy could be enacted

At the rates at which wind and solar capacity were added last year, that build-out would require 24 years. That’s in addition to the 36 years it would take to replace the current contribution of coal-fired power generation. It also ignores the fact that intermittent renewables require either expensive energy storage or fast-reacting backup generation to provide 24/7 reliability.

Back-up power

That brings us to natural gas, the main provider of back-up power for renewables, and the “fracking” (hydraulic fracturing) technology that accounts for half of US natural gas production. Fracking has transformed the US energy industry so dramatically that it is very hard to gauge the consequences of a national ban on it, even if such a policy could be enacted. Would natural gas production fall by a third to its level in 2005, when shale gas made up only around 5% of US supply, and would imports of LNG and pipeline gas from Canada ramp back up, correspondingly?

Or would production fall even farther? After all, one of the main factors behind the rapid growth of shale gas in the previous decade is that US conventional gas opportunities in places like the Gulf of Mexico were becoming scarcer and more expensive to develop than shale, which was higher-cost then than today. Either way, the constrained supply of affordable natural gas under a fracking ban would not support generating a third of US electricity from gas, vs. 20% in 2006. So we would either need even more renewables and storage–in addition to those displacing nuclear power–or, as Germany has found in pursuit of its phase-out of nuclear power, a substantial contribution from coal.

The EPA’s entire, updated estimate of methane emissions from natural gas in 2014, on a CO2-equivalent basis, is just 2.5% of total US greenhouse gas emission that year

One of the primary reasons cited by Mr. Sanders and others for their opposition to shale gas, aside fromoverstated claims about water impacts, is the risk to the climate from associated methane leaks. Here he would seem to have some support from the US Environmental Protection Agency, which recently raised its estimates of methane leakage from natural gas systems.

Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2), so this is a source of serious concern. However, a detailed look at the updated EPA data does not support the contention of shale’s critics that natural gas is ultimately as bad or worse for the climate than coal, a notion that has been strongly refuted by other studies.

Essentially unchanged

The oil and gas industry has questioned the basis of the EPA’s revisions, but for purposes of discussion let’s assume that their new figures are more accurate than last year’s EPA estimate, which showed US methane emissions from natural gas systems having fallen by 11% since 2005. On the new basis, the EPA estimates that in 2014 gas-related methane emissions were 20 million CO2-equivalent metric tons higher than their 2013 level on the old basis, for a year-on-year increase of more than 12%. This upward revision is nearly offset by the 15 million ton drop in methane emissions from coal mining since 2009, which was largely attributable to gas displacing coal in power generation.

In any case, the new data shows gas-related emissions essentially unchanged since 2005, despite the 44% increase in US natural gas production over that period. The key comparison is that the EPA’s entire, updated estimate of methane emissions from natural gas in 2014, on a CO2-equivalent basis, is just 2.5% of total US greenhouse gas emission that year. In particular, it equates to less than half of the 360 million ton per year reduction in emissions from fossil fuel combustion in electric power generation since 2005–a reduction well over half of which the US Energy Information Administration attributed to the shift from gas to coal.

Mr. Sanders and others advocating that the US abandon both nuclear power and shale gas are mistaken or misinformed

In other words, from the perspective of the greenhouse gas emissions of the entire US economy, our increased reliance on natural gas for power generation cannot be making matters worse, rather than better. That’s a good thing, because as I’ve shown above, we simply can’t install enough renewables, fast enough, to replace coal, nuclear power and shale gas at the same time.

What does all this tell us? Fundamentally, Mr. Sanders and others advocating that the US abandon both nuclear power and shale gas are mistaken or misinformed. We are many years away from being able to rely entirely on renewable energy sources and energy efficiency to run our economy. In the meantime, nuclear and shale are essential for the continuing decarbonization of US electricity, which is the linchpin of the plans behind the administration’s pledge at last December’s Paris Climate Conference to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28% by 2025. That goal would be out of reach without them.

Editor’s Note

Geoffrey Styles is energy expert, advisor and communicator. He is Managing Director of GSW Strategy Group in Virginia, an energy and environmental strategy consulting firm helping organizations and executives address systems-level policy. This article was first published on his blog Energy Outlook and is republished here with permission.

About Geoffrey Styles

Comments

I agree with the author that coal should go out first. However, it is a bit weird to assume that installation rates of wind and solar will remain constant. The costs of the renewable power technologies keep on dropping, whereas nuclear keeps getting more expensive. I would say: put a proper price on CO2 emissions of about 100$ per ton, and let the games begin.

There are other assumptions that are really remarkable and off target.

“For example, replacing the output of a 2,000 megawatt (MW) nuclear power plant such as the Indian Point facility just north of New York City would require, not 2,000 MW of wind and solar power, but between 7,600 MW and 9,400 MW, based on the applicable capacity factors for such installations.”

Since 2014 new wind power on average in USA has breached the 40% capacity factor threshold and since the capacity factor has grown still more and is expected to reach 60% as an average for onshore wind.

So you need less than twice the installed capacity of a nuclear power plant to replace it with wind power.

The that assumption that USA needs shale gas is proven wrong by the market. The reluctant approach to overspending to get shale gas will only be fortified by the current fast drop in electricity costs and the similar fast rise in capacity factors for both wind and solar. The capacity factor increase strips away the “backup” market niche and the cost drop makes shale gas too expensive for baseload. In recognition of the dire straits for shale oil and shale gas the long reigned ban on exports has been lifted, which in theory should help the oil and gas industries in USA by giving them access to higher paying markets.

If wind power keeps the same pace as it has done for four decades straight then by 2031 wind produces as much electricity as produced by the entire globe did in 2014 and a few years after wind produces as much energy as the globe uses in total. Solar is moving even faster.

The author simply ignores growth and fails to explain why the market situation should change for coal, shale gas, shale oil and Nuclear. None of these technologies are renewable, none of these technologies are cost effective, non of these technologies gets free energy delivered by nature, non of these technologies are produced by sectors with strong financial footing (to the contrary bankruptcies are occurring every week). How can anyone then expect these technologies to compete against GE (largest industrial company in the Americas), Siemens (largest industrial company in Europe) and Vestas the business pioneer and still ahead of the gang and in good financial state.

As for the 2025 target USA is on track. Utility scale solar dropped cost by 17% and doubled the installed capacity between 2014 and 2015.

Thank you for your comment. However, a quick look at actual US published wind energy capacity factors shows that while onshore wind turbines now routinely achieve 40% capacity factors in favorable months, the annual average is still in the low 30% range and has not changed appreciably since 2013. See: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_6_07_b

Even if average in-service c.f.’s (net of availability) continue to rise, wind is simply not a 24×7 technology, and the cost of the storage necessary to make it so (as opposed to performing frequency regulation and other short-term integration tasks) is still unaffordable.

As for “ignoring growth”, the history of wind turbine installations in the US over the last decade does not exhibit the kind of exponential growth trend you suggest, mainly due to periodic expiration of the main tax credit for wind power. It’s a saw-tooth, rather than a hyperbola. While the wind Production Tax Credit was extended again at the end of 2015, that extension also provided a full phaseout of the PTC by 2020. Despite continued cost improvements and industry rhetoric about cost-competitiveness, US wind has always seemed to stall without its main subsidy.

Intermittent renewables are a useful component of the energy mix, but they’re not yet ready to take over the entire load of electricity supply from dispatchable technologies like gas turbines and nuclear plants.

Wind could very easily be a 24/7 energy source able to deliver all energy humanity needs just on its own if you were ever to prefer that. And you would not need a single battery to do that.

All that is required is that you connect large geographic areas with sufficient HVDC grid capacity and over provision that market by use of state of the art wind turbines with high capacity factor and use the excess electricity to power processes that are not required to run constantly.

Frequency regulation is done in Denmark by use of very cheap installations so just because you in old days used power plants to control the frequency regulation there is absolutely no reason you could not or should not use modern technology to do the job.

I am fully aware that the stop and go subsidy policy and the advent of first fracking gas and then cheap solar has jagged the growth and that is the exact reasons that i used decades and global as the resolution.

The main thing holding back that scenario is cost. But that issue is being resolved with tremendous speed. Between 2008 and 2014 the cost of wind energy dropped 60% and since 2014 Vestas has dropped their average selling price for windturbines by 9% annually. The unsubsidized cost of an average 20 year wind PPA in USA by 2014 was $0.035/kWh. 9% cost drop onto 2021 where the PTC (Production tax Credit) is finally phased out will mean that by then the average unsubsidized wind PPA in USA will be $0.018/kWh, which is half a cent cheaper than the subsidized price per kWh in 2014.

Obviously there is already a complete electricity generation system in USA as everywhere else and wind power is up against fierce competition from solar energy.

Coal and NG generation will unquestionably go extinct in a faster pace than has been the case in the last few years. Mainly because both technologies are heavily dependent upon subsidies and yet still are unsustainable economically. Shale gas and coal in USA is impossible to continue without a huge government bailout.

Nuclear is a hot potato and will probably be bailed out by governments all over the world as a matter of national security.

Biomass, municipal waste, geothermal and hydro will probably be subsidized too because they provide baseload or dispatchable loads.

As for your final remark about not ready yet then you do not need to be ready you just need to have a clear roadmap.

By the way: The added nuclear capacity added in the US in 2015 was zero. As it has been since 1997. Following the authors logic it is thus impossible to build new nuclear power plants, and nuclear cannot play a role in outphasing coal.

There are two renewable energy sources that are rarely mentioned, StratoSolar and power satellites. The first you can Google, the second looks like it could undercut electricity from coal. There is a 3 minute video about it that was part of a presentation at the White House recently. It’s here:

Conventional wind and solar exist and are proven technology, but they are too expensive and although the cost is coming down, it’s not enough. That’s why the subsidies. Can power from space be enough less expensive to not need subsidies? That seems to be the case if Skylon and beamed power electric propulsion gets the cost per kg down by a factor of 100. Details about using conventional rockets to bootstrap are here:

It is quite OK to put some money in R&D of your pet technologies. But you cannot base policy on technologies that exist only in the heads of people. At the moment we do not know if it will work at all, if there are undesired side-effects and how much the produced electricity will cost. One-upon-a-time nuclear also promised to produce electricity “too cheap to meter”, we all know what happened in reality.

There are a couple of historically recent examples where policy was based on technology that only existed in the head of people. One example was the Manhattan project, the other Apollo.

Power satellites are technically less demanding than either of these projects. However, let me put it this way: If we don’t use power satellites, and assuming we must get away from using fossil fuels, what do you suggest?

In WW2 the allies did not stop fighting the conventional war at the moment the Manhattan Project started. And I doubt the military strategy was completely based on using the nuclear bomb before successful tests had been done.

I will give you another example: Hitler also relied on wonderweapons that would turn the war in its favour. But the nazis were beaten by conventional weapons before they were realised.

The Apollo program was a goal in itself and not part of a greater strategy, so not really a comparison.

The answer to your question is given below by Jens: Use the proven technology that is there. Plus: make polluters pay for the damage they do.

You are making the assumption that “proven technology” will solve the energy problem. There is no question that we can get energy from wind and ground solar, but the question is at what cost? That’s especially a problem with base load power and beyond that getting power at a low enough cost to make synthetic hydrocarbons for mobile applications like tractors and aircraft.

Also, making polluters pay isn’t going to be easy to apply to India. If we can offer an energy source that undercuts coal, that should be easy. If it is more expensive than coal, I think it’s going to be a hard sell.

Now eventually I expect there will be ground solutions, like nanotech PV paint. But how long will those take to develop?

The reason the atomic bomb was developed under the name Manhattan Project was that a bomb had been envisioned large enough to destroy a city the size of Manhattan. Germany had already thought in similar terms in WWI with the Paris siege cannon, and later with mortars capable of destroying Sevastopol, as well as with V2 rockets and rail guns aimed at London. The Japanese battleship Yamato could have demolished America’s West Coast cities. The organizational capabilities necessary for creating such complex technologies would be subsequently redirected toward reaching the singular goals of Outer Space and ultimately the Moon. Yet they remained ineffective in addressing the profusion of countermeasures available to partisans on the vast plains of Russia or in the mountains of Yugoslavia and China. Mankind has since entertained new proposals on nuclear power too cheap to meter, climate engineering to inhibit global warming, and CO2-free energy beamed down from above the stratosphere. All of these innovative concepts might be capable of achieving marginal successes, but they could not be extrapolated indefinitely without evoking social and geophysical repercussions possibly beyond the power of future generations to control. While Hitler was content with establishing a 1000-year Reich, the recent hearings of the German commission on nuclear waste disposal have now indicated the need for a government authority enduring for 10,000 years to protect and monitor the radioactive legacy left behind by the country’s atomic reactors that are already being abandoned.

Thanks for that correction. I had read my cited reference in a book about the period. It is quite possible that the scientists working on the project also drew that assumption to express the bomb’s destructive power. The true origin of the name had perhaps been kept a secret to obscure the location of the office in Manhattan. World War II was wrapped in many mysteries.

I do not have the foggiest idea of the cost point you expect for your two interesting energy production concepts.

Wind is below grid parity everywhere now and solar is going to be within months.

One must assume that you are confident your favorite technologies will go way below the cost point for wind and solar, so could you be as kind as to provide us with your personal opinion on the subject and hopefully backed by links.

As for your rhetoric question, the development away from fossils is on track and requires nothing out of the ordinary from the wind and solar industries – just business as usual will suffice very nicely.

Ps. Danfoss is building a demonstrator targeting $0.0136/kWh for osmotic power in conjunction with geothermal so there are other emerging technologies to watch.

I worked on a previous (thermal) version of StratoSolar, but it’s been several years now. Ed Kelly, the guy who invented the concept has run the analysis and gets (long run) 3 cents/kWh without storage and 5 cents/kWh with storage. StratoSolar has a huge storage advantage over other PV sources because you can lift a large mass from the ground to the platform at 20 km with a motor/generator when you have excess power and lower it when you don’t.

For power satellites, if you run levelized cost of electricity backwards, it turns out that for 3 cents/kWh you can spend $2400/kW, a factor of about 80,000. The cost of the ground side is about $200/kW, the parts and labor cost for the power satellite is around $900/kW and *if* we can get the parts down to 6.5 kg/kW and the lift cost to GEO down to $200/kg or less, the transport cost comes in at $1300/kW. That way the total fits under $2400/kW.

At high flight rates, 25,000/year and up, the cost to low earth orbit (LEO) for Skylon is expected to get down to $120/kg. The cost inflation to GEO is about 2.5 for chemical fuel, but with beamed energy and arcjet propulsion it’s not hard to get the cost well under $80/kg.

I am, as you might suspect, a big fan of industrial expansion into space http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society . However, solving the carbon and energy problems is more important than how it is done. I don’t think wind and ground solar can replace the 15 TW of power we now use, but if you think it can, be happy to see your numbers.

Besides this is really no challenge for wind or solar at all as both can easily do that and in fact much more – in fact so much more that you can run the world entirely only on either wind or solar.

Not that you would ever do so since both will take a major marketshare and there are several other renewables that we will not stop using and some renewable technologies that are moving fast towards viable cost points.

Kite wind or your Strato Solar vision is not really in that bracket but OTEC, Osmotic Power and advanced biofuels definitively are.

Also we have to find a way to clean up after the Nuclear age, which most likely involves extending the age with nuclear technologies that can burn nuclear waste and fraction nuclear waste into useful fractions.

In short we are moving towards a future with no energy shortage but also a future where more emphasize will be on meeting supply and demand.

“Can power from space be enough less expensive to not need subsidies? That seems to be the case if Skylon and beamed power electric propulsion gets the cost per kg down by a factor of 100.”
Until 2020, a non-existent space technology have to be a factor of 100 cheaper while present technology still on a learning curve only have to be 30% cheaper. Which one will the highest propability to succed?

Can present renewable technology replace fossil fuel at all? I don’t think so, and that view is shared by just about everyone technically qualified who has looked into the problem. Look into the work of the late David MacKay.

Excellent article, in particular the point that natural gas emissions were just 2.5% of total US greenhouse gas emissions in 2014.

With its new rules requiring emission cuts of 40-45% for new O&G wells, the Obama administration has chosen a symbolic act rather than addressing the larger, more impactful causes of the problem, namely livestock emissions. This research shows US livestock emissions are 70% larger than those from oil & gas:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014JD021551/full

Not only does the administration’s symbolic act *not* make meaningful progress towards solving the problem, it burdens the energy sources we are using to actually make headway with additional costs, which we’ll all pay as energy consumers. Way to kick both the American people and the O&G industry when they’re down, DC! With “friends” like you…

Great article, hits nail on head. This is what James Hansen has been trying to explain to renewable energy cheerleaders that can’t seem to grasp logic. Wind and solar are great but they are not nearly enough and not nearly in time to make a difference to global warming.

Politicians are in an unenviable position. They are compelled to satisfy the expectations of an impatient electorate for an entire universe of issues. In most cases, they have few professional qualifications to appraise the physical limitations of scaling particular technological innovations. When Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor of California, he promised a hydrogen highway for connecting San Francisco with Los Angeles. In Montana, Gov. Brian Schweitzer proposed supplying the entire United States for 40 years with motor fuel synthesized from local coal as soon as the oil price surpassed 40 dollars a barrel. The Guardian quoted a U.S. official on May 15, 2012, affirming that “governors up and down the East Coast are extraordinarily interested in broadening out their energy portfolio” with the Google offshore wind farm. These and other comparable proposals have since been abandoned due to the comparatively small investments required for improving the existing supply infrastructure. Since extremely frequent grid interruptions in the United States would likely become more prevalent without nuclear power, for instance, better maintenance is preferred over the uncertain dependability of generation alternatives. Over 98 percent of New York City’s in-city power generation is provided by natural gas, half of which is produced nationwide by fracking operations. According to the American Wind Energy Association in 2011, only 6.4% of Pennsylvania’s electricity could be generated by exploiting all of the wind energy potential in that state, which therefore is committed to shale gas in simple consequence of availability. The arguments for abandoning both nuclear power and fracking may appear ecologically compelling, but they currently remain incompatible with the requirements for system reliability in the world’s largest industrial society.

“…only 6.4% of Pennsylvania’s electricity could be generated by exploiting all of the wind energy potential in that state…”
Nonsense.
Germany has twice the population density (227/km2 vs 110/km2) and produces already 15% of its electricity by wind. A share that Germany increases with ~1%/year. It targets ~50% in 2050…

“… frequent grid interruptions in the United States would likely become more prevalent without nuclear power …”
Opposite!
The many thousands of small generators dispersed over country implies far more redundancy as well as shorter supply lines.
Experience in Germany confirm it.
Electricity supply reliability in Germany increased substantial in last decade when the Energiewende took steam. Many thousands of small generators (mainly wind & solar) were then installed.

Now German electricity supply is ~8times more reliable than in USA (SAIDI 15minutes vs 2hrs in USA). Similar applies for Denmark.

Kindly inquire at the American Wind Association about the credibility of its 6.4% prediction for Pennsylvania. The very few wind production localities indicated on the state map indicate that there is very little to compare with Germany, where wind turbines are distributed throughout the northern half of the country. Pennsylvania has 717 wind turbines, Germany 26,772 for a population that is only six times as large. In result, there is about five times the wind capacity per capita here, while electricity consumption is only about half that of the United States. Reliability was already exceptionally high in Germany before the advent of renewable energies, since the country has over 1,000 municipal utilities, few overhead power distribution lines and no air conditioning load spikes, all in a country only the size of Montana. Renewable energy oversupplies frequently threaten to destabilize the grid, however, necessitating an increasing number of interventions (shutting down wind turbines while paying the operator for lost revenues) that cost over €1 billion per year.

Jeffrey,
From the AWEA site about Pennsylvania:”Land based technical wind potential at 110 m hub height: 43,565 MW”

It implies that these wind turbines can deliver >75% of Pennsylvania’s electricity (30% CF). With hub height of 135m (e.g. the Enercon 7.5MW wind turbine) it will be >100%.

Germany:
“… interventions (shutting down wind turbines while paying the operator for lost revenues) that cost over €1 billion per year
According to the href=”http://www.ewi.uni-koeln.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Publikationen/Studien/Politik_und_Gesellschaft/2015/2015-10_Germanys_Wind_and_Solar_Deployment_1991-2015_Case_Study.pdf”>EWI report all curtailments (not only wind) cost ~€25mln/year (2014).
So ~50cent/year per customer connection….

These expenses naturally involve much more than only disconnecting wind turbines from the grid. On the other hand, a higher figure may be quoted by the end of the year, since the number of grid interventions continues to rise.

Coal is declining fast and should be completely out phased first but next in line to go obsolete is Fracking gas.

With solar and wind performing as it does the author is probably right in assuming there will still be a marketshare for both nuclear and Fracking gas by 2025 but the idea that the US emission targets will not be met without these archaic power generation technologies is simply not supported by evidence.

Ps. Banning Fracking is not at all necessary to ensure that the Fracking industry continue the current implosion. Just taxation and rigorous enforcement of environmental standards will suffice to kill the business along with dropping renewable energy prices.

Fascinating
US use open pit mines for coal, so I assumed those have similar cost price. But apparently their cost price is ~3x higher than that of the Germans lignite power plants (~2.5cnt/KWh)??

Differences?
– German power plants pay for CO2 emissions and US plants do not.
– German plants are up-to-date using the efficient circulating fluidized bed process.
– German plants are situated at the mine (so no railway transport of coal).
– German labor is slightly more expensive.
All this cannot explain the huge cost price difference???

Nuclear
US NPP’s premature closures become substantial. As US whole sale prices may decrease similar as in Germany with increasing renewable, nuclear will be slaughtered in the next decade.
Though NPP’s in backwards monopoly markets / states may survive that decade at the expense of their customers.

Bas they do have really cheap coal in USA but the Powder River Bassin coal is far from the population centers and rail transport despite 40% discount on top of 40% government rail road subvention is expensive.

The situation in USA is such that the current coal power plants are unable to produce electricity at the same cost point as new wind power generation even if you exclude anything else than the cost of coal and transportation of coal.

Since coal peaked in USA in 2007 it has rapidly lost 33% of its peak market share (45% to 30%) and most assets in the coal value chain is now stranded assets and most of the coal industry is bankrupt or heading straight towards bankruptcy. The average market capitalization value has dropped more than 90% in an otherwise positive market.

Ps. do not consider coal power in Germany as quality because Germany never ever built a power plant with Danish quality or anything remotely resembling Danish quality. More than 80% of the coal is converted to electricity (47%) and district heating and the ash and flue gasses is used for various industrial products + Danish power plants use higher quality coal with far less pollutants. The motivation was never really there in Germany because they long ago decided to subsidize the loss making mines in order to retain at least some jobs.

Although I do not prefere coal power, you underestimate german engineers. There is now nearly no lignite plant online with less than 40% due to continuous upgrades of the power plants in the recent years, making them also much more flexible in ramping up and down. The top end for lignite is now at 45-46% in Neurath, and hard coal with 48% is also usual here for brand new plants. As well as fly ash is used for cement production for many years, gypsum from desulphurisation is used in costruction and has completely removed gypsum from mines in the market, and so on.
Nevertheless use of coal should go down, which happens so far in a significant amount in 2016 as data shows.

In Scandinavia we are very pissed with German protectionism and the way the German Government has tried to force for instance Vattenfall to keep on to their Lignite value chain despite their will, which included intervention by the German government and diplomatic pressure.

It is now before the EU court but with power being distributed like it is there is probably a very small chance of getting justice.

“Germany has done nothing to build the much needed internal HVDC infrastructure”
That’s not quite correct.
– Merkel installed a new law which minimizes the delays NIMBY can cause.
– First, though small pieces are installed.

The problem is that the northern German states now also generate a massive amount of wind electricity which coincides with Danish wind.

“… shown above, we simply can’t install enough renewables … to replace coal, nuclear power and shale gas at the same time.”
That was not shown.
Only that with the 2014 expansion rate of wind & solar, it takes 24yrs to replace nuclear and 36yrs to replace coal.

However, as shown by Denmark (135people/km2) and Germany (226people/km2), the expansion rate of renewable can easily be much faster. E.g. in the past 6yrs the share of renewable in Germany grew from 17% to 33% (2.5%/a)
Denmark migrates even faster while the electricity price for consumers, excl. general taxes, is ~10cnt/KWh.
Agora report about Denmark: https://goo.gl/EYB0p2

Considering that:
– price decreases of wind/solar/storage continue (new offshore is with ~8cnt/KWh now cheaper than new nuclear);
– USA has more solar & wind, while having only 32people/km2;
the migration speed for USA can easily be much higher.

Bas instead of those very long timelines why do you not just plot the actual development in both wind and solar. Both will on their own before 2031 produce more electricity than the world did in 2014.

Some analyst predict that the cost trajectories for both wind and solar is grinding to a halt – not actually seen yet and not expected by the wind or the solar industry majors.

Some analyst predict that going beyond a certain penetration percentage becomes prohibitively expensive. Currently Vestas average turbine selling cost drop 9% annually while scale and quality increase and their CFO calls the trend remarkable stable. If that trend continue until 2021 where the PTC in USA ends then US wind PPA will be between 75% and 80% cheaper than natural gas based electricity without any subsidies whatsoever. I do not think the required transmission lines and other solutions needed to match supply and demand will ever be expensive enough to free Fracking gas generators from devastating competition.

What is we turned the tables and asked the simple question – how is nuclear going to be competitive – how is coal going to be competitive – how is Fracking gas going to be competitive.

Adwen is now erecting their new 8MW offshore turbine where the rotor is 180 meter, which gives it a whopping 20% larger swept area than the former biggest wind turbine Vestas 164 8MW. Interestingly the blades weighs the same as the blades for Vestas 164.

I for one cannot get my head around the notion that archaic power generators should somehow retain lasting competitive advantages in the face of such forceful and rapid technology advances.

Thank you.
Yes, a real long distance to transport the coal in US.
So the zero transport costs in Germany partly explain why lignite keeps its position and gas and oil lost 33% of their market share since 2010 in German power generation.
The rest is explained by:
– the ban on fracking (shale) gas here;
– the new high efficient (44% vs 33%) flexible lignite power plants who also need far less maintenance (thanks to the low burning temperatures in the furnace, etc).

Lignite isn’t subsidized. Only the underground coal mines until 2018 (negotiated with the miner unions in 2007. Hard fights to close the mines asap conflict with German Rheinland culture). The mines will stop the moment the subsidy stops.
But imported US coal may continue to play a role. In Netherlands, we have 2 new flexible coal power plants at our sea harbors. They have no high chimney’s as they hardly emit any pollution thanks to their burning process which resembles that of gas.

Extrapolating the fast renewable grow of the initial years may deliver over-estimations. So I avoid that.
In Germany (high latitude, little sun) cost price estimations for PV-solar in 2050 are 2-3cnt/KWh (Agora). Wind may produce a little cheaper then, so ~2cnt/KWh in Germany.

Even depreciated nuclear cannot compete against that price levels. But, despite being the highest subsidized method of electricity generation already, nuclear may get even more subsidies.

Btw.
EU study found that 20MW wind turbines are feasible with present technology, but above that we need new technology (not sure that technology will come).

The widely maintained claim that German lignite is not subsidized is a matter of interpretation. The German Mining Act prescribes mining royalties of 10 percent for all types of extraction that may nevertheless be suspended at the discretion of the individual states. Lignite mining has almost always been alleviated of that obligation, thus effectively subsidizing its production. By contrast, Lower Saxony imposed royalties of € 695 Million on natural gas production in 2012 alone. http://www.mw.niedersachsen.de/portal/live.php?navigation_id=5459&article_id=126590&_psmand=18

“…the Netherlands will be closing all of its coal power plants by 2020.
I’m Dutch and live in NL. Your linked article only state that it would cost €7billion. That is more than earlier reports estimated. So it gives responsible minister Kamp, who commissioned the study, a good argument against closing (we Dutch don’t throw €7billion away).

Note that Kamp belongs to the VVD (right wing party). Another minister from the VVD recently increased the max. speeds on our highways, which increases CO2 emissions substantially…

I was already thinking that it would be a good idea for Energy Post to publish an analysis of energy prospects in the Netherlands, so perhaps you could recommend that to Karel Beckmann. Your comments on the fragmentary nature of the information at the link I had provided indicates what misleading impressions may be created by such short reports. Here in Germany, we have little else to go on.

Bas do not worry about the continued scaling of wind. I have a friend that is the chief editor of the magazine for engineers here in Denmark and he has constantly argued that solar will kill wind and offshore will never be commercially viable and so on and so on. Usually such predictions are shattered in just a few years. Currently they are building facilities that will cater for up to 25MW turbines in Esbjerg and beyond that the coming boom in floating power plants will ensure options for future scaling. Vestas has built a strange looking turbine (actually four turbines on the same tower mounted on two arms) that I get to watch every time I walk through the city park in Roskilde to my home. The idea is that generator weight scale with the cube of the capacity so by dividing into four turbines they lower the generator weight by a factor 16.

Some years ago they speculated that wind turbines would never grow past 10MW. The whole business know they are in competition with solar and everyone also recognizes that unless cost are driven down there will never be the boom in offshore they want to see happening.

The current cost point has to be lowered 70%, which may look like a lot but the industry is far ahead of the plans they thought was possible only a few years ago.

Here in Denmark we gave up upon coal power technology aiming at 60% efficiency a few years ago. The simple idea was to continue the succesfull research into metallurgy to allow higher temperature and to achieve higher temperature burning by means of gasification and oxygen increase. These technical concepts are no being transferred to China in order to lower the Chinese coal consumption.

Jens,
It seems contra-intuitive but the efficiency improvements (44% vs 33%) of the new coal plants is mainly due to circulating fluidized bed furnaces. The gas-like coal dust is burned in an oxygen rich gas environment with low temperatures.

The low burning temperatures also:
– greatly prevent the creation of harmful substances, such as NOx’s (saving filter costs).
– allow for much less maintenance (the steel is less affected thanks to the lower temperatures), so reducing the operational costs.
Also because the burning itself is in the middle of the open space in the furnace (not touching the walls).

Jeffrey,
Established interests of the ruling (political) class, and high import tariffs. Nearly every house in South-/West-Turkey has heat panels as those are made locally and don’t take business away from the monopoly utilities (don’t know the other regions as my last visit there was ~20years ago).

Similar interests probably prevent the separation of transport and and generation of electricity in many US states and South-/East-EU countries. They prefer to keep the monopoly structure against EU policy. At best it’s clientism; e.g. the monopolies donate to the ruling political parties, pay politicians to advice, etc.
USA has similar regarding health care, as shown by Michael Moore in his movie ‘Sicko’. USA spends ~16% of GDP for health care, while the top 20 countries, in which people live on average 3yrs longer, spend on av. 10% of their GDP ( http://goo.gl/1jE3zA )!